In my dream you had a skeleton figure. Fragile, so destructible, completely unprotected. I watched you as you lay in the empty room and I needed to protect you, an instinct stronger than anything else. The isolated crib in the centre of the room, where you could be watched by them, where they could pity you because they didn't love you. I tried pulling you away from them, as the word 'anorexia' slipped from their lips, and in that moment, I loved you more than ever. You weren't the boy I fell in love with while awake, your personality, your strength, they were different; but inside, I could still feel you, I knew that under the shell it was you, exactly the way I knew you. So love didn't change.
(An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.)
Possessions (Byatt)
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